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How to make a money-making content website

Here’re the exact steps for creating content web sites that are powered by WordPress and make money from selling advertising space and affiliate products.

Select niche

The first step of the process is to select your niche. The factors you should consider include:

  1. Popularity – the more popular a topic, the higher chance it has to be profitable. Popularity is generally measured in terms of search volume; that is, how many people search Google for a particular search phrase.
  2. Competition – lots of competition means that a particular topic is likely profitable. Lack of competition indicates that there might not be enough of money in the given market. However, strong competition also means that it will be more difficult to extract the right type of people to your website, and that it might take longer. Note that lots of competition is not necessarily the same thing as strong competition.
  3. Cost per click – CPC is the dollar value advertisers put on each referral. The higher the value, the better.

There are many keyword research tools to help with the niche selection. Among the best free ones is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

A part of niche selection, is also the compilation of a list of keywords along with their search volumes, average CPC and level of competition.

Your decision on which niche to enter will depend on your available resources and time. The more time and resources you have, the more difficult niche you can target. If your resources and/or time are limited, you will either have to select a more easy niche, or start to compete in a more difficult niche with easier keywords and then build from there.

Register domain name

Once you select your niche, it’s time to register a domain and name.

There are two approaches to domain name selection:

  1. Keyword-match domain – these are domains where your main keyword is part of the domain name. The advantage of these domains is that they tend to rank easier and higher in the search engines for their particular keywords. The very best are exact-match domains where the main keyword makes up the entire domain and there are no additional words in it. The disadvantage of keyword-match domains is that they are often not easy to remember and are not usually good for branding purposes.
  2. Brandable domain – these are usually domains with catchy names, but they don’t necessarily need to mean anything (such as Google.com or yahoo.com, for example). The advantage of these domains is that they are good as brands and are easy to remember. On the other hand, they don’t rank in the search engines without search engine optimization.

There are many reputable domain name registrars (we recommend Moniker) and the cost of domains is usually very low.  The fee for a .com domain is around $10 and has to be renewed annually.

Get web hosting

The next step is to buy a web hosting account. You should probably start with a simple shared hosting and get their most basic plan. As your hosting needs will grow, it is easy to upgrade to a better plan or to change web hosting provider.

The only requirements you should be looking for and at this stage are:

  1. Linux – operating system.
  2. cPanel – site configuration and management software application.
  3. MySQL – the database your site will be using.
  4. PHP - a general-purpose scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages.

Most good web hosting providers (we recommend Hostgator) will have these features as part of their standard offer.

Set up site

This step involves the following:

  1. DNS change – you will need to log in to your domain name registrar and modify the default DNS information for your domain. You will once to insert the domain name servers given to you by your web host. Once you do this, it will take between a few minutes and 48 hours until the DNS change propagates across the Internet and your website will become reachable at your web hosts IP address.
  2. WordPress installation – follow the instructions on this page to install the latest version of WordPress.
  3. WordPress theme – select your theme from the official WordPress themes depository and follow the procedures on this page to install and activate it.
  4. WordPress plugins – there are hundreds if not thousands of add-ons for WordPress, called plugins. Depending on what additional functionality you need, there will usually be one or more plug-ins you can choose from. Use the official WordPress plugins directory as your main plug-in resource and follow the instructions on this page to learn how to add a new plug-in to your WordPress installation.
  5. WordPress permalinks – follow the instructions on this page to choose your permalink structure. There  are a number of structures you can use and your choice will probably depend on your needs. However, the Day and name structure is one of the most popular ones.
  6. WordPress navigation – depending on your choice of theme, you will either need to modify the navigation menu or insert a widget in order to set up your site navigation. Depending on the purpose and content of your site, you might need a widget that links to all your pages and you might need another widget that links to your blog archives, either by category or by date, or both. Here is more information on using widgets.
  7. Custom changes – as you will continue growing your site, new needs will emerge forcing you to do customized changes to your WordPress installation, particularly your theme and settings. It is impossible to say in advance what those needs will be. Therefore, you are on your own when it comes to customizing your WordPress installation.

Publish content

Now is the time to start writing and publishing. You should start by writing a separate page for each of your most important keywords. Your goal is to be as comprehensive as possible and to provide the best information as possible.

Once you are done with your most important keywords (say, you have published 3-10 pages), you should start writing the regular blog posts. The purpose of the blog posts in this to provide interesting piece of content on a topic that is of interest to your target audience. Your blog posts do not need to be optimized for your keywords. Their main aim is to bring in your target audience and to keep them coming for more. Therefore, the only thing that matters is whether your blog posts are interesting for your target audience or not.

Promote content

Your promotional efforts should focus  primarily on your homepage and your keyword-pages, and only secondarily on your blog posts.

The way to go about promoting your content is by identifying all the places where your target audience spends time. This includes other blogs, online forums, social networking sites, etc. You want to create a list of these places and visit them regularly.

Build relationships with key individuals in your market, participate in discussions by adding value and generally try to be helpful to your target audience wherever it might be.

If there are any frequently asked questions related to your niche, make sure you either answered them on your keyword-pages, or have a separate blog post for each. Next time somebody asks the same question in a forum or another place, summarize the answer for them right there and point them for a more detailed explanation to your site.

As you continue building relationships with key players in your marketplace, try to get them involved in your own site by either doing interviews with them, asking them to comment on your posts or information, exchange guest posts with them, follow  their developments and post updates on your blog, etc.

Also, look for types of content that are viral in nature, such as videos, jokes, funny photos and stories, etc. that you can post on your blog. These are often huge traffic attractors.

Monetize

As soon as you have some content on your site, you can start monetizing it. The easiest way to monetize your site is  with Google Adsence. Start to learn about this program on their help page, then try and test some of their ad formats on your site. Play around with size and placement of the ads to achieve the highest conversion rates and highest payouts.

As your site grows in traffic and importance, you can start approaching the key players in your marketplace (particularly, e-commerce sites, manufacturers, off-line merchants, larger publications, sellers of one-off product and service fees, etc.) to offer them advertising space on your blog. Initially, your goal will is to use up your advertising inventory, no matter the price. Once potential advertisers see that your advertising inventory is fully booked, the perceived value of advertising on your website will grow substantially.

Rinse and repeat

You can repeat this process on two levels:

  1. Publish/promote new content – adding new pages or posts to your site increases its value proportionately. Every new page is a potential source of new visitors to your site and, therefore, also the potential source of advertising revenue.
  2. Create more websites – following this process will allow you to make new websites and, thus, to diversify your income streams.